VII Colour Conference Rome
SAPIENZA Università di Roma

Engineering Faculty

Viale dell'Università, 30
00185 Rome, Italy
06 44704251

Good afternoon, my name is Paul Stickley, I am an academic at the Glasgow School of Art , Scotland, in the United Kingdom.
My academic responsibilities are primarily Within the School of Design in the roles of Head of Departments of Visual Communications BA (hons)
Programme Leader Communication Design Post Grad (Masters)
Director of Studies / PhD Supervisor for practice lead Doctorates

I am truly thrilled and a little nervous to be invited to your conference for many reasons. Firstly I would like to apologise for being unable to share your language , and hope you do not see this in any way as arrogance.

The Committee Kindly advised on corrections and I have duly corrected the paper to be more specific and also in order to keep to time.

I can also provide examples of my colour practice as screemn image in a variety of formats including video for interested parties and for the conference if they so wish.

I was motivated to submit this Paper due to the themes of the VII National Colour Conference – in particular, the range of approaches to colour research , Philosophical, Physiological and Psychological, inviting my research interest in the nature of the experience of colour, and its Phenomenological and hermaneutic content.

Moreover, and the reason for my nervousness, I am interested in interdisciplinarity and collaboration, the conference was inclusive enough to allow an academic from an Art and Design Background to deliver a paper which seeks to create new knowledge from collaborations with experts from unlike disciplines.
My Purpose is to find a collaborator or collaborators who would like to help me explore my theory of mixed methodology, and develop a series of prototypes for the treatment of PTSD (post traumatic stress disorder ) and a more general funded project for Health and wellbeing in the Highlands and Islands of Scotland.

During my 30 years as a qualified artist/designer/educator and academic my practice has taught me that mercurial properties of colour in some sense represent ourselves in the immediate indeterminacy of our being - as referred to by Heideggers text Being and Time, when speaking to our ontological consciousness.

My doctoral thesis explored how colour encourages an engagement with the sites of our ‘intimate lives’ - the condition for our experience of being. I continue to suggest that this is achieved due to the absence of subject in colour and its presentation simulating as mimesis, the ‘indeterminate immediate’ of our being. Colour allows us to locate objects in space and ourselves in the world and to retrieve objects, events, thoughts and emotions from memory.

Through all my work I have been aware of the interdisciplinary nature of colour research as a phenomenon, In Design, Science, Philosophy and Psychology through the physiological and hemeneutic properties of our human perception, it’s mechanisms and it’s philosophical impact on the conditions and constructs of our individual lives. Lives both lived and remembered, narrated and imagined.

The consiousness of being mediated as colour is a form of phenomenological membrane which connects us to the world, as described by Merleau-Ponty Husserl and Ricoeur as a ‘suspension of disbelief’ through psychological reduction or Daydream.

-The Principle of Reduction relies on a suspension of disbelief and the psychological construction of an inner world.” The above quote by Merleau-Ponty, is taken from the text “the Phenomenology of Perception” explains a principle in phenomenology known as reduction.

Merleau-Ponty further explains …

“The alleged conditions of perception precede perception itself only when, instead of describing the perceptual phenomenon as the first way of access to the object , we suppose round about it a setting in which all disclosure of the implicit and all cross-checking performed by analytical perception are included, and all the norms of actual perception vindicated-- in short a realm of truth , a world.’

This Reduction relies on a suspension of disbelief and the psychological construction of an inner world.” The internal construction of this inner world, of this daydream state I propose, is via colour, colour in mind and colour as light The visual material of internal daydreams like those described by Ricoeur. I further postulate that colour in mind is light, but phenomenologicaly manifest as colour as Plato has said, “what we see in light is colour.” There fore without colour there is no light and vise versa.

In the research models/ digital colour works I have created, the quality of the aesthetic is graphically constructed to create a form of mimesis, encouraging a cycle of re-cognition of the sense of the ‘Indeterminate immediate. The aesthetic is key to suspension and the temporal involvement in the ‘field of presence.’

Ricoeur suggests that
‘ Perhaps we may think of aesthetic experience in terms of alternations of sleeping and waking states’.

It is, I propose, in this way that aesthetic experience behaves as the vehicle for activating suspension and accessing Daydream and memory.

This phenomenological coloured space in mind of internalised light of the imagination speaks of a shared psychological terrain, and the territories of Perception, Physiological Psychological and Philosophical. It is in this sence of shared terrain that I would like to find collaborative experts in other fields.

Gaston Bachelard uses the metaphors of the cellar and the garret to speak of psychological sites of our most intimate lives, the chiaroscuro of our mind with an inherent set of values - shells and the home, all very clear symbols of a shared philosophical and psychological space.

This is a clear visual language, manifest through our internalised tools for perception. Whether archetypal, semiotic, hermeneutic, it is a way to track and speak to those most intimate sites of language and meaning creation - the space. Research it appears has spent little time looking at this visual space. The work of Lacan, F de Saussure and much of the academic interrogation of language has prioritised the textual and the spoken over the visual. My research aims to activate, engage, and treat via this preverbal semiotic space in mind which Julia Kristeva refers to as the pre verbal semiotic ‘chora’ I also suggest that Colour is the form of the Chora.

‘Indeterminate Immediate’ as aesthetic experience.

By looking for extended perios a perceptual movement is manifest in the manor of the Purkinje effect re-represented time after time.

The title of this piece speaks of Heidegger’s comments on ontology, in particular Dasien , the consciousness of being. He uses the term ‘indeterminate immediate’ as a description of our awareness of our state of consciousness in the world.

This reference to our consciousness of being is also resonant with colour in it’s state as Colour Shadow (Goethe) or as Purkinje’s ‘Shift’ - these qualities of colour create a realm of visual truth which may allow us to experience the ‘indeterminate immediate’ consciousness of our own lives through the representation of this ephemeral state. My practical works as digital imagery uses after-imagery as part of the enhancement of the properties of indeterminate and immediate, but also as an external and internally created re-representation of colour in mind. Colour in this way I suggest connects physiological, psychological and philosophical boundaries and links forms of Colour Research.

I have developed a mixed methodology for the practice-based doctoral Researchers through reflective activity on visual works, synthesising practice and theory of colour as object, colour as image in relation to hermeneutics and phenom.

The methodology insists on synthesis and interdisciplinarity across visual arts practice, treatise on colour philosophy, perception and Phenomenological Philosophy

I have employed a Number of Philosophical principles to explain my position regarding access to Mind through colour, which I suggest have primary significance to colour signification.

The principles are Reduction as a form of suspended consciousness or daydream in accordance with Ricoeur’s Phenomenology.
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• Temporality as Field of Presence
Merleau Ponty and Husserl refer to ‘Field of Presence’ which is the minds capacity to reopen time from remote past events and to travel ( to be carried back) to another horizon to the event in its time. The notion of three fold present, of all moments of past present and future in one moment I suggest connects us to Daydream where we suspend our usual temporal perception creating a Pause or an opening which we travel to and through, more accurately posit our memories in the Present. In this way I again suggest we might be able to use colour as the physical membrane creating a portal to reach areas of human trauma.

The final area is
• Absence and Presence.
The function of the perception of colour to be both absent and present in its physiological and phenomenological perceptual reading is part of my preposition that colour is a reflection of Martin Heideggers reference to our consciousness of being as ‘indeterminate immediate’ which is a shared nature of both colour and being.

Installations

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Projections
These images should not be seen as true a representation of the quality of colour in my work. These images serve simply as an indication of the type of visual quality. It is important to note that these are not the works themselves. The works then function through colour as projected light in keeping with this quote from Plato
“What we see in light is colour”

The research will be mediated via new technologies it’s roots are deep in the traditions of colour theory and early connections with phenomenological approaches to philosophy and psychology.

Show tools

Current research

As I have said my primary area of interest is in relation to phenomenological and psychological impact and in particular to Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) and other forms of trauma treatment.

It is my ambition to develop my research and hypothesis to the treatment of PTSD with collaboration from Esteemed academics around the world, and I acknowledge the need for rigorous academic debate to challenge my assumptions and omissions. On presenting this paper to you all I extend an invitation to interested Parties to collaborate.

Graphically Enhanced Digital ‘Aureotone’ Environment (G.E.D.A.E.)

• Aims - to design a visual prototype, which digitally develops Colour elements of T Wilfred’s Clavilux Piano and H Rorschach’s ‘aureotone’ environments. Also by digital interpretation of Auratone films developed by Cecil Stokes of California, featuring mobile, abstract color effects with a musical and vocal accompaniment.Tried on depressed patients in an army general hospital by Drs. H. E. Rubin and E. Katz, these motion pictures were instrumental in releasing a flood of emotions in patients, thus increasing their accessibility and making it possible for the psychiatrist to establish a proper rapport.

This will be achieved through an investigation of new media Graphics and the innovative potentials for design within this field of audiovisual research. With a view to developing a digital model for screen and web based consumption. The prototype is reliant on visual communications systems and the funding application is primarily to develop the visual aspect of the research and to test the feasibility of graphic translation in the first instance and for web interpretation and legibility in the second.

In addition it is intended to explore an audio pilot for the sound dimension of the project which will be developed via collaboration at a later date as will part of C.R.E.W.

G.A.D.A.E becomes C.R.E.W.

Chromatic Rehabilitation Environment – Website (C.R.E.W.)

Aims - to test a graphically designed digital translation of the research of T Wilfred and H Rorschach as a viable audiovisual environment which builds on prior knowledge. Insert ruben etc This design led research has an application as digital ‘aureotone’ for the treatment of post traumatic stress disorder, with a possible web based solution for domestic treatment.

I am a Senior academic in a project to help regenerate the distributed communities living in the Highlands and Islands area of Scotland. With a particular focus on Health and well being. The Glasgow School of Art Design School has been funded for three years by Highlands and Islands Enterprises (a Scottish Government Body) to use the very recently provided connectivity in this area to serve the needs of a number of communities, established, developing or emerging following these design interventions. An established area of my research interests concernes the communities who suffer from PTSD military and other aspects of Health and wellbeing.

Therefore, I invite any interested parties to contact me if they are interested in shared research and collaboration with this or other projects.

p.stickley@gsa.ac.uk